The Dragon Tree

by Jane Langton

  Aunt Alex too was carried away. She rummaged in her sewing closet and found a bolt of green cloth. In no time she turned it into knightly doublets by ripping it in nine pieces and cutting round holes in the middle of each piece.

  “Here, dear,” said Aunt Alex to Georgie, “try this on.”

  Georgie pulled the green cloth over her head, and then they stood together looking in the mirror, admiring the way the doublet hung loosely front and back.

  “Gallant Sir Georgie,” said Aunt Alex, smiling down at her. Then she frowned. “It needs a belt, I think.”

  By afternoon the entire Fellowship was outfitted in green tunics, held together with belts scrounged from drawers and closets. Next morning Sidney’s father came down to breakfast holding up his pants with his hands. He glowered at Sidney.

  “Uh-oh,” said Sidney, but his mother said quickly, “Wait a sec,” and hurried upstairs. In a flash she was back with a pair of red suspenders. “I hate suspenders,” said Sidney’s father, but he wore them like a good sport.

  For a while the nine knights strutted around, showing off their new doublets, and Otis said, “It’s like we’ve got armor, sort of.”

  Aunt Alex looked on admiringly, and then she had another idea. “Oh, Cissie,” she called out, “your horse. I’ve got just enough left for your horse.” She ran inside and came out with the last square of green cloth. Cissie tucked it under Maisie’s saddle and mounted proudly. Maisie tossed her head and looked magnificent. So did Cissie.

  “It’s too bad you don’t have helmets,” said Aunt Alex, “but they’re beyond my powers, I’m afraid.”

  It didn’t matter. Even without helmets they felt swashbuckling and brave like true Knights of the Round Table, or better yet, the Fellowship of the Noble Tree.

  It was true that Eddy felt foolish dressing up like a little kid, but his huge friend Oliver Winslow slashed the air happily with an invisible sword and Hugo Von Bismarck pushed a button on his antique CD player and a band crashed into life and a singer shouted and a drumbeat rocked the neighborhood, and over their heads the noble tree rustled its leaves almost in time to the music.

  But on the ground Frieda was tired of playacting. She said, “Okay, how about that tree house, you guys?” So once again the nine Knights of the Fellowship got back to work, swaggering in their gallant clothes.

  In the neighboring house Emerald was busy too. She pulled a chair across the floor to her bedroom window, stood on it, and began unhooking the curtains. They were a fine bright shade of green.

  24

  MORE ROPE

  UNCLE FRED WAS doing his best to keep his nose to the grindstone. His great book about Henry Thoreau and the Oversoul was nearly done.

  But there was too much going on. Outside, the tree was like a green village with a population of kids, birds, butterflies, squirrels, and a hundred thousand greedy so-called bugs. And the kids were always spilling over into the house, invading its spaces from cellar to attic. “Hey, Professor Hall,” shouted Oliver Winslow, charging into his study, “you got any pulleys?”

  “Pulleys?” whimpered Uncle Fred.

  “Right, pulleys. Like, you know, they pull stuff.”

  “Oh, pulleys.” Uncle Fred put his head in his hands.

  Oliver was big and goofy, but he wasn’t stupid. Looming enormously over Uncle Fred, he said, “What’s this?” Reaching down with his huge paw, he snatched up a page, stared at it, and said, “Hey, Professor, what’s all this stuff about the Oversoul?”

  The boy actually seemed interested. “Well, it’s a long story,” said Uncle Fred, and he did his best to explain.

  “Oh, I get it,” said Oliver. “You mean it’s kind of a cloud up there over the roof, right? Like a power station of good ideas?” Oliver slapped the page back down. “So how about those pulleys, Professor Hall?”

  There was no point in fighting it. Uncle Fred made up his mind to let the tide of kids roll over him. He gave up on his chapter and led the way to the cellar. In the dimness he pulled the light string and looked around vaguely, but at once Oliver whooped, snatched up a box of pulleys, and thundered back upstairs.

  Uncle Fred retreated to the kitchen, where he found his wife opening cans of tuna fish and Georgie spreading mayonnaise on slices of bread. But there was no peace here either, because Sidney Bloom flung open the side door, his eyes insanely bright, his doublet flying behind him, and shouted, “Hey, Miz Hall, we need more rope! Okay if we use your laundry line?”

  Uncle Fred crept back to his study and Aunt Alex looked dazed, but Georgie jumped up at once and ran out to the back porch and pulled down the sheets while Sidney undid the rope from the hooks in the ceiling. Then Georgie draped the sheets over the railing and Sidney galloped back through the kitchen with the rope in his arms, explaining as he headed for the door, “We tie one end to a piece of the tree house, see, Miz Hall?” Slam went the screen door. “Then we throw the other end over a branch, and pull it down, and up she goes!”

  “I see.” Aunt Alex sighed. She also saw the force of the driving will of the nine Knights of the Fellowship in their insane devotion to a wild idea gone mad.

  But her laundry line wasn’t enough. “More rope!” yelled Frieda.

  The knights scattered around the neighborhood, and soon Mrs. Winslow was surprised to find herself draping Oliver’s baggy pants over a bush while Hugo’s mother hung her husband’s union suit over a windowsill and Frieda’s father looked on helplessly while Frieda charged out of the house with his best climbing rope. “Okay, okay,” he shouted after her. “Just don’t cut it, that’s all. Don’t you dare cut that rope!”

  So now they had enough. Sidney’s hoist lifted the floor of the tree house to the level of the first branch. Sidney sat beside it, holding it firmly while Eddy attached Mr. Caldwell’s climbing rope to Aunt Alex’s laundry line and Oliver swarmed higher up the tree and dropped the free end to the ground. Then, while Rachel and Otis and Georgie and Hugo and Frieda hauled down on the rope, the floor of the tree house rose clumsily through the tree, guided by Oliver to a place where three branches made a level platform. There he nudged it into place, and everybody cheered.

  The tree house was nearly finished. The Knights of the Fellowship bustled around, attaching ropes to the four walls and the roof, while over their heads the tree waited quietly for the bumpy ascent of five more bulky objects into its leafy crown.

  It took another day of sweaty work to snake the cable of an electric drill up through the branches, and drill holes for the screws that would hold the whole thing together, and fasten supporting struts to prop up the floor.

  At last there came a moment when the last strut was bolted fast to the trunk of the tree. Their work was done. Balanced here and there around the finished house with their tools dangling from their hands, the Knights of the Fellowship grinned at each other. Their faces were dirty and their doublets torn and ragged, but somewhere overhead a brown bird sang and at the top of the tree new twigs popped out and everywhere at once the hungry insects (if that was what they were) scribbled and scribbled.

  “Snacks!” cried Frieda. “Everybody bring snacks.” At once there was a general scramble to the ground. Everybody ran home to ransack refrigerators and cupboards. Soon heavy baskets were hoisted aloft and the booty was laid out on paper napkins.

  The snacks didn’t last long. Everybody wanted to be up there at once, crowded together, eating everything in sight and enjoying the sense of being high, high up in the noble tree in a cozy home they had made themselves. They looked out on the town of Concord from their dizzy height, rejoicing in the sight of church steeples and rooftops, and reaching out to pick the hard little knobs that had taken the place of the flowers.

  Next door Mortimer Moon watched the celebration with glee. “They built it on my side,” he told his wife. “Those dumb kids have trespassed on my side of the tree.”

  “Good gracious, Mortimer. You must speak to Professor Hall. Tell him it’s got to come down.”

  �
�I’ve got a better idea. I won’t say a word, but I promise you, that shack won’t last long.”

  From his window on the second floor Mortimer had a fine view of the slanting struts supporting the floor of the tree house. They were hefty four-by-fours, but they were within easy reach.

  25

  THE INVISIBLE KNIGHT

  MARGERY MOON ENJOYED bursting into Emerald’s room without warning to open drawers and look under the bed and pry. This morning she was scandalized by what she saw, or rather by what she didn’t see.

  “Emerald,” she thundered, pointing a furious finger at the window, “what happened to those curtains? Did you take them, you bad girl?”

  Emerald kept her nose in her book and said nothing.

  “Well, where are they? What did you do with them?”

  Emerald turned the page.

  “You stupid girl, I’ll find them.” At once Margery threw open the closet door and rattled the hangers. The curtains were not in the closet, but when she pawed through Emerald’s drawers she found what she was looking for. Triumphantly she snatched out the curtains, then gasped in horror, because a round hole had been cut out of the middle of one.

  Emerald was punished. Mrs. Moon cut off two weeks of her scanty pay for mowing the lawn, scrubbing floors, dusting furniture, vacuuming rugs, cleaning bathrooms, washing, ironing, and cooking. Emerald obeyed without complaint. Silently she scrubbed and polished, cooked and cleaned. Wordlessly she dusted the Nature Center, fluffed the pillows, and arranged the teddy bears.

  She didn’t care, because now she was not only a maid-of-all-work, she was a member of the Fellowship. She had watched the building of the tree house, feeling part of it from the beginning, as though she herself had sawed the boards and hauled on the rope, because she too was a Knight of the Fellowship, however invisible and unseen.

  “Surely incarceration is indicated.”

  “You mean as a temporary expedient?”

  “Exactly.”

  26

  IT’S ME, THE MOSS!

  THEY HAD ALMOST forgotten what the tree house was for. When the party was over, when nothing was left of the snacks but scattered crumbs of potato chips, they climbed down and headed home—Frieda, Sidney, Otis, Rachel, Cissie, Hugo, and Oliver—because the job was done.

  It was lucky that Eddy and Georgie hadn’t forgotten. Eddy slapped his little sister on the back and said, “Your watch, right?”

  “Right,” said Georgie.

  “Okay,” said Eddy, heading indoors. “Your kindly sovereign will dispatch a courier with emergency rations.”

  “Good,” said Georgie. At once she took her place as guardian in a mossy hollow at the foot of the tree among heaps of sawdust and a litter of abandoned tools. In the glowing twilight a few leaves drifted down, bumped loose by the lumpy shape of the tree house as it had bashed its way upward. Idly Georgie collected a handful.

  Uncle Fred came out a moment later with Eddy’s emergency rations on a tray and settled down beside her. “Look, Uncle Fred,” said Georgie, spreading out the leaves in a fan. “They have scribbles on the back.”

  “Scribbles?” Uncle Fred unwrapped a sandwich. “Our illustrious neighbor calls them insect trails.”

  Georgie held up a leaf in a shaft of sunlight. “But they almost look like writing.”

  “Of course. Why shouldn’t a tree have important things to say? After all, remember the dragon tree of the Western Isles.” Uncle Fred took a bite and looked at her keenly.

  “The dragon tree?” whispered Georgie.

  “The great dragon tree of myth and fable. It’s something Henry said.”

  Georgie thought it over, then asked a sensible question. “What’s a dragon got to do with it?”

  Uncle Fred thought it over too. “Well, I suppose he meant that making stories is very old, as old as dragons.”

  “As old as dragons!”

  “Of course. Nothing is older than dragons. But stories are just as old. They’ve been told and retold all over the world, and changed and transformed and turned into other stories. They just went on and on like a growing tree, new ones growing out of old ones until there was a great dragon tree of stories. And also, Georgie dear—mmm, this sandwich is delicious—don’t forget that the whole world is covered with alphabets.”

  “Alphabets?” Georgie said.

  “Oh, it’s just Henry again.” Calmly Uncle Fred unscrewed his thermos and poured himself a cup of coffee. “Another stroke of genius.”

  Georgie sighed. Uncle Fred was always quoting something mysterious that his hero had written long ago at Walden Pond. Sometimes Georgie saw him talking to the plaster bust, gazing at it as though the drilled holes in Henry’s eyes were looking straight back at him. “Oh,” said Georgie, “I see.”

  But she didn’t see. What did it mean: The whole world is covered with alphabets? After Uncle Fred kissed her and carried the tray back indoors, Georgie stood up and wandered into the backyard to look at the chickens.

  They were settling down for the night and burbling softly. Did the chickens have an alphabet? Were they saying good night in their own language? When one of the chickens squawked, was it saying, “Please move over”?

  The whole world. Georgie bent to look at a rock. There were flat rings of lichen all over its granite surface. Were they some kind of diagram? An alphabet? Did they mean something?

  Slowly Georgie went back to the tree and got down on hands and knees to inspect the carpeting of moss on the massive roots that spread across the grass like the coils of a dragon. Putting her face close, she looked for a pattern in the velvety green garden. Maybe the moss was saying, “Hello, up there! It’s me, the moss!”

  But of course it wasn’t. Georgie stood up. At once the cross-eyed cat bounded across the grass and rubbed her leg. She picked it up and held it against her cheek, wanting to get inside its furry head. Was it saying to itself, “I will now purr”?

  But the mind of the cat was as remote as a star. So were the green thoughts of the moss. And if the lichen had secrets, they were hidden deep down in the rock.

  27

  THE GOOD SNAKE

  SUMMER WAS NEARLY over. The sun no longer rose to the top of the sky. But the thousands of meandering tracks on the leaves of the tree were thicker than ever, as though the busy little insects were in a fury of scribbling.

  In spite of the bugs, the noble tree seemed well and strong. It bushed out over the rooftops and its broad crown stretched far out over the road. Cars and trucks moving northwest and southwest on Walden Street passed through its kindly pool of shade.

  The trunk was now five feet across, and its bark was as crannied and rough as if the tree had stood in that very spot for a thousand years, as if it had been full grown when Indian tribes moved through the forest and fished in the neighboring stream, as though it were already a tall tree when Parson Bulkeley journeyed into the wilderness to build a meeting house, and taller still when the embattled farmers fired their muskets at the North Bridge, and as if it had been a mighty tree when Henry lived at Walden Pond.

  Now it seemed so ancient a thing that the gnarled roots bulged up in hills and domes and folded back on themselves like kneeling elephants, and fiddlehead ferns grew thick in the mossy furrows.

  The small green knobs that had followed the flowers had fattened and turned red. Now the bright fruit sparkled among the branches, dangling in clusters from every twig.

  In the house next door, Mortimer Moon surveyed the bumper crop from his bedroom window. One of the scarlet fruits dangled so close, he reached out and plucked it.

  It lay in his hand, red and shiny and faintly speckled. Was it a peach? A plum? No, it looked more like an apple.

  “Why, it looks delicious,” said his wife, reaching for it.

  Mortimer jerked his hand away, and exclaimed, “Don’t touch it. It’s probably poison.”

  “Oh, of course,” said Mrs. Moon grumpily. “It would be, wouldn’t it?” She turned away, and soon the tinkling tune
of her windup bird twittered up the stairs.

  Left to himself, Mortimer turned the strange fruit this way and that. He studied it with a magnifying glass. Enlarged, it gleamed redder than ever, and the speckles were golden yellow. It looked so tasty, he was tempted to take a bite. He shouldn’t, of course. Anything that beautiful must be dangerous. But he couldn’t resist. Sinking in his teeth, he bit off a chunk. At once he made a face and spat it out. It was bitter! It tasted like poison!

  From the window of her locked room in the attic, Emerald heard the trilling of the brown bird that had come from far away. She watched it hover and perch on a nearby twig. The dangling fruit bobbed up and down. Emerald reached out, picked one, and took a bite. It was delicious.

  From the kitchen door of the house across the way, Aunt Alex came outdoors with a basket and filled it with fallen fruit. Then she took it inside and showed it to Uncle Fred.

  He was delighted. He bounded out of the chair. “The tree of knowledge,” he cried, frisking around the room. “They’re like the fruit of the tree of knowledge in the garden of Eden.”

  Aunt Alex laughed and protested, “Oh, but Fred, you’re forgetting the snake. What about that wicked snake that told Eve to eat the apple?”

  “But that’s just it,” exclaimed Uncle Fred. He stopped capering and smiled at her serenely. “It wasn’t wicked. It was a good snake.”

  “A good snake!”

  “Of course. When Adam and Eve ate the apple, their brains began to work. They knew things. They weren’t like children anymore.”

  Aunt Alex looked at the shining fruit in her basket and said thoughtfully, “Why don’t I make a pie?”

  “But Mortimer, what if she leans out the

  window and calls for help?”

  “I’ll screw the window shut.”

  “What if she breaks the glass?”

  “I’ll cover it with chicken wire.”

  “But what about those bratty kids next